Throughout his career as an optical physicist Martin McCall has struggled to understand James Clerk Maxwell’s beautiful equations describing the electromagnetic field. He has discovered that many of the things he learned as an undergraduate at Imperial were, if not exactly lies, then not entirely the whole truth either. Light doesn’t always travel in straight lines at constant speed, or even bend according to the laws of refraction he learned at school. The journey has taken him from beetles to black holes, and most recently to editing history.
Biography
A reformed experimentalist, McCall began his career in industry where he worked for GEC. After a spell as a Post Doc. at the University of Bath he re-joined Imperial where he has been ever since. He has written an undergraduate textbook on mechanics and relativity.